The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat.
Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else.
You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.)
The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
“Any agent on any VPS/VM” is an agent with self hosted infra. Lovable is an agent with managed infra. I think having managed infra is neat.
Secondly, a lot of the apps built on lovable are for internal purposes and not necessarily used publicly.
Honestly I could go on and on with various points to refute your dumb comment.
Is lovable worth 13B? Probably not, but I completely get why people think it is. It serves a market of non technical people that want to build apps and websites without having to use something horrible like Wordpress.